The laws which concerned women at that date were so frightfully unjust that the most kindly disposed men inevitably took their cue from them, and looked on their mothers, wives, and sisters as beings with wholly inferior rights; with no rights, indeed, which should ever stand against theirs. The deconsideration of women (as dear Barbara Bodichon in later years used to say) was at once cause and result of our legal disabilities. Let the happier women of these times reflect on the state of things which existed when a married woman’s inheritance and even her own earnings (if she could make any), were legally robbed from her by her husband, and given, if he pleased, to his mistress! Let them remember that she could make no will, but that her husband might make one which should bequeath the control of her children to a man she abhorred or to a woman of evil life. Let them remember that a husband who had beaten and wronged his wife in every possible way could yet force her by law to live with him and become the mother of his children. Personally and most fortunately (for I know not of what crime I might not have been guilty if so tried!) I never had cause of complaint on the score of injustice or unkindness from any of the men with whom I had to do. But the knowledge, when it came to me, of the legalised oppressions under which other women groaned, lay heavy on my mind. I was not, however, in those early days, interested in politics or large social reforms; and did not covet the political franchise, finding in my manifold duties and studies over-abundant outlets for my energies.
Another difference between the first and latter half of the century is, I think, the far greater simplicity of character of the older generation. No doubt there were, at the time of which I write, many fine and subtle minds at work among the poets, philosophers and statesmen of the day; but ordinary ladies and gentlemen, even clever and well-educated ones, would, I think, if they could revive now, seem to us rather like our boys and girls than our grandparents. Thousands of allusions, ideas, shades of sentiment and reflection which have become common-places to us, were novel and strange to them. What Cowper’s poetry is to Tennyson’s, what the Vicar of Wakefield is to Middlemarch, so were their transparent minds to ours. I remember once (for a trivial example of what I mean) walking with my father in his later days in the old garden one exquisite spring day when the apple trees were covered with blossoms and the birds were singing all round us. As he leaned on my arm, having just recovered from an illness which had threatened to be fatal and was in a mood unusually tender, I was tempted to say, “Don’t you feel, Father, that a day like this is almost too beautiful and delicious, that it softens one’s feelings to the verge of pain?” In these times assuredly such a remark would have seemed to most people too obvious to deserve discussion, but it only brought from my father the reply: “God bless my soul, what nonsense you talk, my dear! I never heard the like. Of course a fine day makes everybody cheerful and a rainy day makes us dull and dismal.” Everyone I knew then, was, more or less, similarly simple; and in some of the ablest whom I met in later years of the same generation, (e.g., Mrs. Somerville) I found the same single-mindedness, the same absence of all experience of the subtler emotions. Conversation, as a natural consequence, was more downright and matter of fact, and rarely if ever was concerned with critical analyses of impressions. In short, (as I have said) our fathers were in many respects, like children compared to ourselves.
Another and a sad change has taken place in the amount of animal spirits generally shared by young and old in the Thirties and Forties and down, I think, to the Crimean War, which brought a great seriousness into all our lives. It was not only the young who laughed in joyous “fits” in those earlier days; the old laughed then more heartily and more often than I fear many young people do now; that blessed laugh of hearty amusement which causes the eyes to water and the sides to ache—a laugh one hardly ever hears now in any class or at any age. An evidence of the high level of ordinary spirits may be found in the readiness with which such genuine laughter responded to the smallest provocation. It did not need the delightful farce of the Keeley’s acting (though I recall the helpless state into which Mr. Keeley’s pride in his red waistcoat reduced half the house), but even an old, well-worn, good story, or family catch-word with some ludicrous association, was enough to provoke jovial mirth. It was part of a young lady’s and young gentleman’s home training to learn how to indulge in the freest enjoyment of fun without boisterousness or shrieks or discordance of any kind. Young people were for ever devising pranks and jests among themselves, and even their seniors occupied themselves in concocting jokes, many of which we should now think childish; the order of the “April Fool,” being the general type. Comic verse making; forging of love letters; disguising and begging as tramps; sending boxes of bogus presents; making “ghosts” with bolsters and burnt cork eyes to be placed in dark corners of passages; these and a score of such monkey-tricks for which nobody now has patience, were common diversions in every household, and were nearly always taken good-humouredly. My father used to tell of one ridiculous deception in which the chief actress and inventor was that very grande dame Elizabeth Hastings, Countess of Moira, daughter of the Methodist Countess of Huntingdon. Lady Moira, my father and two other young men, by means of advertising and letters, induced some wretched officer to walk up and down a certain part of Sackville Street for an hour with a red geranium in his buttonhole, to show himself off, as he thought, to a young lady with a large fortune who proposed to marry him. The conspirators sat in a window across the street watching their victim and exploding with glee at his peacock behaviour. The sequel was better than the joke. The poor man wrote a letter to his tormentress (whom he had at last detected) so pitiful that her kind heart melted, and she exerted her immense influence effectually on his behalf and provided for him comfortably for life.
Henry, the third Marquis of Waterford, husband of the gifted and beautiful lady whose charming biography Mr. Hare has recently written, was the last example I imagine in Ireland of these redundant spirits. It was told of him, and I remember hearing of it at the time, that a somewhat grave and self-important gentleman had ridden up to Curraghmore on business and left his bay horse at the door. Lord Waterford, seeing the animal, caught up a pot of whitewash in use by some labourer and rapidly whitewashed the horse; after which exploit he went indoors to interview his visitor, and began by observing, “That is a handsome grey horse of yours at the door.” “A bay, my Lord.”
“Not at all. It is a grey horse. I saw you on it.”
Eventually both parties adjourned to the front of the house and found the whitewashed horse walking up and down with a groom. “You see it is grey,” said the Marquis triumphantly.
Certainly no one in those days dreamed of asking the question, “Is Life worth Living?” We were all, young and old, quite sure that life was extremely valuable; a boon for which to be grateful to God. I recall the amazement with which I first read of the Buddhist and Brahmin Doctrine that Existence is per se an evil, and that the reward of the highest virtue will be Absorption, or Nirvana. The pessimism which prevails in this fin de siècle was as unknown in the Forties as the potato disease before the great blight.
I much wish that some strong thinker would undertake the useful task of tracking this mental and moral anæmia of the present generation to its true origin, whether that origin be the ebb of religious hope and faith and the reaction from the extreme and too hasty optimism which culminated in 1851, and has fallen rapidly since 1875, or whether, in truth, our bodily conditions, though tending to prolong life and working power to an amazing degree, are yet less conducive to the development of the sanguine and hilarious temperament common in my youth. I have heard as a defence for the revolution which has taken place in medical treatment—from the depletory and antiphlogistic to the nourishing and stimulating, and for the total abandonment of the practice of bleeding—that it is not the doctors who have altered their minds, but the patients, whose bodies have undergone a profound modification. I can quite recall the time when (as all the novels of the period testify), if anybody had a fall or a fit, or almost any other mishap, it was the first business of the doctor to whip out his lancet, bare the sufferer’s arm, and draw a large quantity of blood, when everybody and the aforesaid novels always remarked; “It was providential that there was a doctor at hand” to do it. I have myself seen this operation performed on one of my brothers in our drawing-room about 1836, and I heard of it every day occurring among our neighbours, rich and poor. My father’s aunt, whom I well remember, Jane Power Trench (sister of the first Lord Clancarty), who lived in Marlborough Buildings in Bath, was habitually bled every year just before Easter, having previously spent the entire winter in her bedroom of which the windows were pasted down and the doors doubled. A few days after the phlebotomy the old lady invariably bought a new bonnet and walked in it up to the top of Beacon Hill. She continued the annual ritual unbroken till she died at 79. Surely these people were made of stronger pâte than we? In corroboration of this theory I may record how much more hardy were the gentlemen of the Forties in all their habits than are those of the Nineties. When my father and his friends went on grouse-shooting expeditions to our mountain-lodge, I used to provide for the large parties only abundance of plain food for dinners, and for luncheons merely sandwiches, bread and cheese, with a keg of ale, and a basket of apples. By degrees it became necessary (to please my brother’s guests) to provide the best of fish, fowl and flesh, champagne and peaches. The whole odious system of battues, rendering sport unmanly as well as cruel, with all its attendant waste and cost and disgusting butchery, has grown up within my recollection by the extension of luxury, laziness and ostentation.
To turn to another subject. There was very little immorality at that time in Ireland either in high or low life, and what there was received no quarter. But there was, certainly, together with the absence of vice, a lack of some of the virtues which have since developed amongst us. It is not easy to realise that in my lifetime men were hanged for forgery and for sheep-stealing; and that no one agitated for the repeal of such Draconian legislation, but everybody placidly repeated the observation (now-a-days so constantly applied to the scientific torture of animals), that it was “NECESSARY.” Cruelties, wrongs and oppressions of all kinds were rife, and there were (in Ireland at all events) none to raise an outcry such as would echo now from one end of England to the other.
The Protestant pulpit was occupied by two distinct classes of men. There were the younger sons of the gentry and nobles, who took the large livings and were booked for bishoprics; and these were educated at Oxford and Cambridge, were more or less cultivated men and associated of course on equal terms with the best in the land. Not seldom they were men of noble lives, and extreme piety; such for example, as the last Protestant Archbishop of Tuam, and a certain Archdeacon Trench, whom I remember regarding with awe and curiosity since I had heard that he had once got up into his own pulpit, and (like Maxwell Gray’s Dean Maitland) made a public confession of all his life’s misdoings. The second class of Irish clergymen in those days were men of a rather lower social grade, educated in Trinity College, often, no doubt, of excellent character and devotion but generally extremely narrow in their views, conducting all controversies by citations of isolated Bible-texts and preaching to their sparse country congregations with Dublin brogues which, not seldom, reduced the sublimity of their subjects to bathos. There was one, for example, who said, as the peroration of his sermon on the Fear of Death:—